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People who don’t read Albert and Alex Wesker and Alfred and Alexia Ashford as victims of child abuse confuse me.
Whatever superficial form of luxury or privilege their lives might have had they were all being used as the eugenics experiments of genocidal madmen, not being raised by parents who loved them.
EXACTLY.
The Wesker children were straight up kidnapped from their parents, isolated from each other and normal human interaction, and were deprived of emotional sustenance which children desperately need. They were experimented on, indoctrinated, and brainwashed with the ideologies of Umbrella to turn them into Spencer’s ideal agents. And then, at the end of it, only Alex and Albert ended up surviving! And Alex was left comatose! One singular survivor among dozens, completely unaware of what his hidden siblings had suffered. Not to mention the fact that the Wesker children were literally conditioned to feel anxious and uncomfortable unless they were in close physical proximity to Spencer, which I don’t even need to say is CREEPY AS FUCK!!!!!
The Ashfords I’m less familiar with, but given the fact that Alexia was given control over an entire lab at the age of TEN, whatever happened to them cannot have been good.
All this to say Wesker is a product of his upbringing, and his behavior makes perfect sense when you understand what happened to him: all he knew was clinical, scientific sterility, the constant betrayal and politics of Umbrella, and brutality. It was all he had been taught. And his killing of Spencer, who is by all accounts HIS GROOMER, followed by what could be considered his three-year existential crisis that led to the events of RE5, only makes MORE sense in the context of his own abuse. He spent his entire life trying to become his own person, someone who was beholden to only himself and had complete independence and made his own decisions. He wanted his achievements, his decisions, his LIFE, to be his own. And then to find out that he had literally been cultivated like a fucking staple food crop into being what he is, conditioned to act and behave in certain ways at Spencer’s behest, and given the illusion of choice, would break anyone. Everything he had worked to become was suddenly and violently called into question. If he was a glorified experiment, then was there any part of himself that he could truly call his own? What decisions had been his, and what had been the conditioning he was subjected to?
All this in mind, his killing of Spencer is not only completely justified, but it’s exactly what I would do in his situation. His behavior after the fact also makes much more sense in the context of a mental breakdown. What better way to assert personhood and independence than by ascending to divinity?
And given his upbringing devoid of emotional nurturing, his obsession with Chris also takes on a whole new angle. Many people point out time and again that their rivalry is intensely homoerotic, and the romantic tension between them is severe in a lot of ways. But let me postulate a new theory: Wesker is absolutely in love with Chris, and he obsesses over this love until it becomes violent hatred (he canonically views sex and violence as one and the same), clinging to it against all odds and going after Chris till the very end, because he knows that love is the one thing Umbrella specifically never taught him, never brainwashed into him- therefore, his love of Chris (and others) is one of the very few things he can concretely say is unequivocally his. The love he feels is the product of nothing but himself, and for a man whose entire life was rigged from the beginning, and was left adrift after realizing this, why wouldn’t he clutch to any piece of driftwood he could find in the storm?
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